New Jersey Sues Tour Company That Stranded Travelers Overseas

There’s one thing that’s worse than having your vacation abruptly canceled out from under you because the tour company folded, and that’s having it happen during your vacation, so you end up stranded far away from home. A New Jersey-based company did that to their customers back in October. Now the state has filed suit against the company under New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act, aiming to get customers their money back.

Toward the end, the company continued to sell tour packages even though they were pretty much insolvent. Naturally, they offered customers a discount if they paid cash. No, not to drum up more business or save on banking fees, though those are great reasons to offer cash discounts. Paying cash didn’t work out so well for consumers in the end, since it that they couldn’t file any pesky chargebacks after being left stranded on vacation with no accommodations or travel arrangements.

“[The company owners] knew that we were going to be stranded and they let us leave,” one traveler who paid $6,000 for a ten-day tour of Italy and was abandoned two days in told the Star-Ledger.

The state aims to compel the company’s owners, who are brothers, to give up all money and assets that they obtained by selling allegedly fraudulent vacations.